Open your sock drawer. Go on, take a look. Tell me: what kind of socks do you have? If your response is “ankle socks”, then I have bad news for you: you are an avocado-eating, flat-white-sipping, no-home-owning millennial. But if you would rather die than expose your ankles to the wind, congrats: you are a long-sock-wearing member of gen Z.
At least, that is the theory espoused by the podcast host Phoebe Parsons, whose TikTok on the subject has been watched 1.7m times. “This is exactly how you can tell the difference between a millennial and a gen Z just by looking at their feet,” Parsons says in the clip, before proudly holding her ankle-socked foot up to the camera and declaring: “I’m a millennial.” Her video ushers the humble sock into the ranks of style choices that are, apparently, dead giveaways for distinguishing members of one generation from another – or, as I like to call them, “millennial tells”.
